19 ms·

It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is abou

by cwmma 4mo ago

It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.

ceejayoz 4mo ago
> So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election… Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.
- davkan 4mo ago
  Why become a lord in Scotland when you can become a voter in Delaware.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  Land is bought and sold in government-regulated parcels. You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them.
  - xd1936 4mo ago
    Sure, corporations would _never_ get into the real estate market...
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cogman10 4mo ago
    Why not? Isn't it fundamentally the same idea as apartment complex tenets getting votes? Why couldn't a business sell off lockers to companies giving them voting access? Walk in Closets? Very small room apartments? What's the minimum size of real-estate needed?
    - throwway120385 4mo ago
      Except if I really wanted to be an awful human being, I'd just buy property, subdivide it, and then multiply my votes in the town election by the number of property units I've individually sold to my various LLCs. This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
      - cogman10 4mo ago
        Totally agree. The argument I'm making is that this Delaware ruling is terrible for exactly the reasons you are outlining. The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
    - cwmma 4mo ago
      I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.
  - underlipton 4mo ago
    You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them, so far.
  - mindslight 4mo ago
    Yes, you can. The county does not appear to be registered land (Torrens title) where the Registry would have some say in whether a transfer is valid. So you can straightforwardly hire a surveyor to draw up a plot plan with many square foot chunks, and then execute and record a different deed for each of them.
    - singleshot_ 4mo ago
      What would happen if the deed (a contract) was an agreement to violate the law restricting minimum lot sizes and was therefor illegal? It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
      - mindslight 4mo ago
        My point was that the laws regarding those minimum lot sizes are about buildable lots. Although now that I'm looking into this I think the snag would be trying to record that plot plan, where the Registry would be mechanically looking for a town approval stamp on the plan before they were willing to record it. But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!) The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
        singleshot_ 4mo ago
        This idea is equally wrong for different reasons, but I do have a measure of appreciation for you having abandoned your first intrinsically broken idea upon the first resistance you encountered. Fail fast! Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote. (You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
  - floatrock 4mo ago
    Lets be armchair evil for a sec... What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into? And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces? Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")? Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain? If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities? Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
    - SoftTalker 4mo ago
      In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered. Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
      - Hizonner 4mo ago
        You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
        4mo ago
  - thrance 4mo ago
    For now. Corporations rule the world, and there's nothing that a few bribes here and there can't fix. Hell, they've gotten the right to vote, in spite of all common sense and constitutional arguments. What makes you think they won't be able to go all the way and take over the entire democratic process?
- convolvatron 4mo ago
  say I partitipate in .. 8 businesses in the district, and all of them are independent corporate entities that own the land they operate on. and each of them has multiple owners. I have some influence in the vote of all of these companies, and maybe we can even assume that most of the owners have similar views on things like property taxes in districts they don't reside in. how many votes in that district do I have?
righthand 4mo ago
[flagged]
- nh23423fefe 4mo ago
  Why are you pretending this argument wasn't addressed in the opinion?
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    But it wasn't, really. > Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote. > Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a citizen of the United States. That just means I have to give 100 people POAs.
    - forgetfulness 4mo ago
      Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
      - joshkel 4mo ago
        FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg https://aboutblaw.com/blQg: > Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons. Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."
Hizonner 4mo ago
How about fuck absentee landlords, especially if they're not actually people?
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  Seriously, there should be exceptions for the rare case it's an actual person who can't go for an actual reaaon
stefantalpalaru 4mo ago
[dead]
advisedwang 4mo ago
What right? There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.
overfeed 4mo ago
Why can't corporations be toen councilors or mayors in those same towns? A privilege availed to other voters there. I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.

by cwmma 4mo ago

It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.

ceejayoz 4mo ago

> So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election… Sure you can. You just have to sell them some land as part of it.

davkan 4mo ago
Why become a lord in Scotland when you can become a voter in Delaware.
SoftTalker 4mo ago
Land is bought and sold in government-regulated parcels. You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them.
- xd1936 4mo ago
  Sure, corporations would _never_ get into the real estate market...
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- cogman10 4mo ago
  Why not? Isn't it fundamentally the same idea as apartment complex tenets getting votes? Why couldn't a business sell off lockers to companies giving them voting access? Walk in Closets? Very small room apartments? What's the minimum size of real-estate needed?
  - throwway120385 4mo ago
    Except if I really wanted to be an awful human being, I'd just buy property, subdivide it, and then multiply my votes in the town election by the number of property units I've individually sold to my various LLCs. This is kind of a violation of the "one man one vote" ideal that is the bedrock of our society. It easily turns in to "money buys influence" which is exactly the opposite of what made the US a great country to live in. If you don't understand that and you're a US Citizen you should really retake the civics / political science classes from high school.
    - cogman10 4mo ago
      Totally agree. The argument I'm making is that this Delaware ruling is terrible for exactly the reasons you are outlining. The judge effectively said in the conclusion "Trust me, there's no abuse and this is fine".
  - cwmma 4mo ago
    I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.
- underlipton 4mo ago
  You can't just split up an acre of land into square foot plots and sell them, so far.
- mindslight 4mo ago
  Yes, you can. The county does not appear to be registered land (Torrens title) where the Registry would have some say in whether a transfer is valid. So you can straightforwardly hire a surveyor to draw up a plot plan with many square foot chunks, and then execute and record a different deed for each of them.
  - singleshot_ 4mo ago
    What would happen if the deed (a contract) was an agreement to violate the law restricting minimum lot sizes and was therefor illegal? It would be void and regardless of recordation, no transfer or subdivision would have occurred.
    - mindslight 4mo ago
      My point was that the laws regarding those minimum lot sizes are about buildable lots. Although now that I'm looking into this I think the snag would be trying to record that plot plan, where the Registry would be mechanically looking for a town approval stamp on the plan before they were willing to record it. But a new avenue has occurred to me that actually saves money on deed costs - nothing prevents multiple corporate entities from jointly owning a piece of real estate on one deed, right? So you could conceivably create one Delaware Series LLC, create an unlimited number of distinct legal entities with that, and then write one deed that lists all of those entities as joint owners of the single piece of real estate. Basically similar to multiple residents living in one house, and each getting a vote (but applied to infinitely scalable corporate entities!) The fundamental flaw here is the law framing the entity itself as having voting rights (also why this attracts so much attention!), whereas if it were framed such that every beneficial owner with over say 35% of the ownership interest could vote, that would be intrinsically limiting.
      - singleshot_ 4mo ago
        This idea is equally wrong for different reasons, but I do have a measure of appreciation for you having abandoned your first intrinsically broken idea upon the first resistance you encountered. Fail fast! Why would thirty companies that owned a company together get one vote each instead of one thirtieth? The thirty companies would each have one vote in determining how to vote the one parent's vote. (You are, however, correct to note that you can record absolute gibberish if you want to, so long as you pay the recorder. This does not effectuate a transfer of land, though; it merely serves as constructive notice to the person who is bound to look for such recorded notice, i.e., the beneficial purchaser for value. In a way, you could think of the function of a recorder as preventer of race conditions, not the database).
- floatrock 4mo ago
  Lets be armchair evil for a sec... What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into? And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces? Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")? Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain? If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities? Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered. Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.
    - Hizonner 4mo ago
      You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
      - 4mo ago
- thrance 4mo ago
  For now. Corporations rule the world, and there's nothing that a few bribes here and there can't fix. Hell, they've gotten the right to vote, in spite of all common sense and constitutional arguments. What makes you think they won't be able to go all the way and take over the entire democratic process?
convolvatron 4mo ago
say I partitipate in .. 8 businesses in the district, and all of them are independent corporate entities that own the land they operate on. and each of them has multiple owners. I have some influence in the vote of all of these companies, and maybe we can even assume that most of the owners have similar views on things like property taxes in districts they don't reside in. how many votes in that district do I have?

righthand 4mo ago

[flagged]

nh23423fefe 4mo ago
Why are you pretending this argument wasn't addressed in the opinion?
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  But it wasn't, really. > Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote. > Any legal entity other than a natural person entitled to vote, must cast its vote by a duly executed and notarized power of attorney from the legal entity granting the authority to cast its vote to its designated attorney-in-fact… The person casting the ballot for such entity shall be age 18 on or before the date of the election and a citizen of the United States. That just means I have to give 100 people POAs.
  - forgetfulness 4mo ago
    Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?
    - joshkel 4mo ago
      FWIW, it sounds like the judge may be open to ruling against such an action. From his decision at https://aboutblaw.com/blQg https://aboutblaw.com/blQg: > Even if Plaintiff had made a “vote dilution” or “one person/one vote” claim under the Equal Protection Clause, it fails. Plaintiff does not assert facts that would adequately support such a claim. Plaintiff does not allege... that natural person voters are a minority or are politically cohesive [or] that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons. Although he also notes that the recent Callais case, severely weakening section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, may change this - and, of course, waiting until the Legalize Asbestos Consortium is doing its thing and trying to file a lawsuit is much more complex than preemptively saying "only natural persons can vote."

Hizonner 4mo ago

How about fuck absentee landlords, especially if they're not actually people?

Avicebron 4mo ago
Seriously, there should be exceptions for the rare case it's an actual person who can't go for an actual reaaon

stefantalpalaru 4mo ago

[dead]

advisedwang 4mo ago

What right? There is no right for non-residents of a city to vote in that city elections just because they own property there. Owning that property via a LLC shouldn't change that.

overfeed 4mo ago

Why can't corporations be toen councilors or mayors in those same towns? A privilege availed to other voters there. I'm being sarcastic because I don't like it. Corporations are a simulacrum of people, and at best, their personhhood a useful legal fiction under very limited number of scenarios.